Family is not an important thing. It's everything.
Michael J. Fox
I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.
Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.
The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.
That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
Pain is temporary, film is forever.
I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
I can't always control my body the way I want to, and I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.
There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.
The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.
The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.
No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.
I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.
Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.
Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
Pity is just another form of abuse.
The 'Rescue Me' gig was a unique opportunity to play a character - a misanthropic, angry guy - who was so contrary to how people think of me.
Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.
I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.
If I don't get food in my mouth, I'm still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don't get arrested for indecent exposure, I'm happy. I'm worried about keeping my hair, not how it's combed.
I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.
I definitely believe in a higher power.
But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it's not how our similarities work together; it's how our differences work together.
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
As much as Parkinson's is about movement, the end stage is being frozen. So the more I let that happen, the more I'm gonna be stuck within that and unable to reverse it.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.
Humility is always a good thing. It's always a good thing to be humbled by circumstances so you can then come from a sincere place to try to deal with them.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.
You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.
By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.
When you're a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you're a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.
The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says 'you're cute', I'll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says 'you make me laugh so much'.
I take the medication for myself so I can transact, not for anyone else. But I am aware that it is empowering for people to see what I do and, for the most part, people in the Parkinson's community are just really happy that Parkinson's is getting mentioned, and not in a pitying way.
Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.
I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
